What It’s Like Being a Woman in a P.G. Wodehouse Novel

by David Galef

Your name may be Mary or Sue or Muriel, in which case the course of true love may proceed with only a hiccough or two. If it’s Honoria or Gladys, you’re a frightful specimen who probably makes unpleasant-sounding clicks in her throat.

If you’re an aunt, you have a husky voice developed from riding to hounds and are given to pronouncements such as “What ho!” and “I say, Bertie, don’t be such a frightful ass.” Alternately, you may be an Aunt of the Wrong Sort, in which case you’re continually trying to get your nephew engaged to a woman who is well-born but clearly unsuitable.

If you’re young, you may wear garters. If old, a lorgnette.

You’re in love you’re in love you’re in love. Or beloved, a rather fraught business, akin to being worshiped on a reedy pedestal shaken by frequent gusts of wind.

You participate in a harmless bit of umbrella thievery that turns out to have unforeseen repercussions, namely that your nearest and dearest gets nabbed and is due to appear before the magistrate next Tuesday, unless, unless—you must think.

You have no impeccable valet but may have a lady’s maid. Or have taken on the job yourself, solely to form an impression of the peerage for your newspaper column, “Peerless Pauline.”

You’re invited to a weekend at Blandings Castle, but when you arrive, you find that one of the  guests is the man with whom you parted brass rags a fortnight ago.

You snort through your nostrils when enraged.

Your husband is a lord who was up at Eton in the ’Sixties and whose principal joy these days is watching a prize sow root for mast in her trough, offering her the occasional over-ripe medlar.

You heave a brick through a window, but only in good fun or emboldened by love.

You want your prospective mate to make something of himself in life. To that end, you try to mold him into a better male specimen by enrolling him in the Thinking Men’s Club for Social Improvement.

The men around you are such sniveling incompetents or else hearty outdoors types who think nothing of a ten-mile hike before breakfast—yet not Freddie, who has a good heart but an endearing stammer when he’s flustered.

You have a musical laugh, like the tinkling of far-off bells in a Swiss hamlet.

You may have worked in a shop, done some typing, performed a bit, or held a job as  governess, but now it’s time to settle down. Too bad that a gentleman from your days onstage recognized you at Holborn Station and is blackmailing you.

You have an old school chum named Audrey, who can lend you a quid in a pinch.

Cyril is gormless in a sweet sort of way. But you’re practical, and you can’t marry on less than ten thousand in the funds. Nor do you see why you should comprise one jot.

You willingly hide Gussie under your bed when the gendarmes come around, now that you know what a frightful goof he is.

You feel like beating Reggie about the head with a truncheon or else running your fingers through his curly hair. It depends on whether he’s made good with the bet he was supposed to place on Sprightly Dancer in the fourth.

David Galef has published humor in places ranging from the old British Punch to Spy and The New York Times Book Review. For over a decade, he’s written a humor column for Inside Higher Ed about a school called U of All People. He’s also the author of over a dozen books. His latest work of fiction is My Date with Neanderthal Woman, which won Dzanc Books’ short story collection award. His day job is professor of English and creative writing program director at Montclair State University. For a little self-aggrandizement, see www.davidgalef.com and @dgalef.